Sunday, June 05, 2016

Just forget about the White Horse Prophecy. It's a fun bit of Mormon folklore, but like most folklore it's fictitious nonsense. More important is the fact that--again, like most folklore--this fictitious nonsense is revealing of, and gives us American Mormons reason to remember, what was at one time a widely shared assumption among Mormon leaders: specifically that, as Brigham Young (and John Taylor, and Harold B. Lee, and multiple others) reportedly said, "if the Constitution of the United States is to be saved at all it must be done by this people" (see, for example, Journal of Discourses 12:204, April 8, 1868).

That's not a reference to an LDS President of the United States--not a Romney, not a Huntsman, not a Hatch, despite the weird interpretations inspired by the aforementioned ersatz prophecy. It's not a reference to any particular person at all. Rather, that's a reference of the Mormon people. Many of whom will be eligible to vote this November. And maybe that is where this old teaching will unexpectedly come into its own as truth.

Let's talk frankly about the presidential election five months from now. Unless something comparable to a meteor from outer space strikes the Republican party apparatus sometime between now and their convention in Cleveland this July, the GOP nominee for president will be Donald Trump. If you've somehow managed not to hear much about the man up until now, believe me, you'll hear plenty before November. What you'll hear about Trump will depend mostly (though not entirely) upon the source, and so feel free to disregard the opinions of a leftist like myself. Listen instead to Mitt Romney, the man whom nearly 80% of you voted for in 2012: Trump is a liar, a philanderer, a man who has regularly engaged in business fraud, a man who is willing to incite others to violence, a man who is an apparent believer in (though who can really tell?) and propagator of ludicrous rumors, scandals, and falsehoods. He is paranoid, narcissistic, at least borderline sexist and racist, untrustworthy, vindictive, and ignorant. He lacks any kind of moral center or temperamental balance; he is cruel and dismissive to any whom he perceives as weaker than him, and craven in seeking the applause of those he perceives (but will never admit to being) more "manly"; he is a bully. In short, he really should not be elected President of the United States.

Having said that, let's be practical here. In a country with a single-member-plurality electoral system and a separation-of-powers constitutional arrangement, both mathematical logic and self-protecting political inertia tends to foreclose any sustained alternatives to the dominance of exactly two political parties--and while 2016 is likely to see a large number of independent candidates on the local, state, and perhaps even national level, the presidential contest is almost certainly going to come down to Trump vs. his Democratic opponent, which will also certainly be Hillary Clinton. And don't start what you're about to say: believe me, I am more than happy to grant that Clinton can be accurately described by any number of the above labels (though definitely not as many!) that have been (also accurately!) pasted on Trump. I sympathize with Alan Jacobs's comment entirely: "If you put a gun to my head and told me that I had to vote for either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, I would but whisper, 'Goodbye cruel world.'"

Note, though, how Jacobs follows that comment up: "But if my family somehow managed to convince me to stick around, in preference to Trump I would vote for Hillary. Or John Kerry, or Nancy Pelosi. In preference to Trump I would vote for the reanimated corpse of Adlai Stevenson, or for that matter that of Julius Caesar, who perhaps has learned a thing or two in his two thousand years of afterlife. The only living person that I would readily choose Trump in preference to is Charles Manson." Now, that's an exaggeration. For whatever it's worth, I'm quite confident that Trump wouldn't be even remotely as bad a president as Manson would be. That is, I don't think he's an Adolf Hitler in the making. More likely a Richard Nixon--that is, a petty and petulant tyrant, a resentful and routine violator of the Constitution, a crook. Though perhaps not; perhaps he'd be more like a Silvio Berlusconi or a Vladimir Putin: a slightly-more-than petty tyrant, a corrupter, someone who could easily leave America's constitutional order "battered and bloody, and ripe for something even worse." But however we imagine a hypothetical Trump presidency, the simple facts remain that, unless 1) you're willing to trust entirely in the unknown, or 2) you're a single issue voter who thinks that so long as Trump will, say, appoint people who hate the Affordable Care Act to the Supreme Court, or follow through on his promise to build a 30 ft.-high concrete wall between the U.S. and Mexico, literally nothing else matters, then it's hard to avoid acknowledging the likelihood that Clinton, however much you dislike her, will not actually be as procedurally criminal or corrupt a president as Trump may well turn out to be. Which is where you all, the Mormon voters of the American West, come in.

The aforementioned political norms and practices in the U.S. have resulted in a political culture than is, at least formally (if not substantively), hyper-partisan; witness the fact that the great majority of the Republican establishment, despite having viciously fought against a Trump victory for months, is lining up behind him. They clearly don't like Trump--but they hate Clinton worse. And that's going to be a problem, because even though the demographics favor a Democratic presidential victory in 2016, and even though Trump's approval rating is abysmal, Clinton's number aren't much better. Given the electorate which Trump's rallies are bringing out, and given all the other ways this election is cycle is proving predictions wrong left and right, is it really likely that Clinton will be able to hold on to Democratic Pennsylvania, Ohio, or Michigan, or prevent Virginia from flipping back to the Republicans? It is, in fact, no sure thing. Donald Trump really could be elected President of the United States. Unless, of course, he can't secure his electoral base.

I live in part of that base--Kansas, which I have every reason to assume will vote Trump in November. As will Oklahoma, Texas, and probably all of the Deep South, and probably all of the northern Plains; partisanship being what it is, Republicans will turn out to vote for Trump, even if they dislike the man intensely, because everyone knows Clinton is just as bad or worse, right? (She's not, by the way.) But partisanship is shaped by socio-economic and cultural variables...and in the Mormon Corridor, those variables are obviously different in many ways. On the crude level of national politics, those variables are not often visible: witness the way that Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, faithful Republican that he is, has lined up for Trump. (Former Utah Senator Bob Bennett, a less hackish man all around, to his credit made his contempt for the man known up to his dying day.) But if there was ever a time in my lifetime when the Mormon voters of Utah (who in theory could determine the result of 6 Electoral College votes), Idaho (4 votes), Wyoming (3 votes), and Arizona (11 votes), responding to the kind of civic imperatives and ethical principles which we members, whatever our degree of orthodoxy or heterodoxy, assume to be right and good, could make those variables actually result in a substantive political difference...well, now would be the time I'd like to see it happen.

Could American Mormons really determine the fate of the election? Perhaps not--aside from Utah, there's not any states where Mormon voters alone could prevent a Republican majority from handing Trump their Electoral College votes. But imagine if, by reaching out to moderate non-Mormon Republicans and using their language skills to help register Hispanic voters, they did? Imagine if American Mormons swallowed their partisan leanings, uneasily remembered the story of Amlici from Alma 2 (think 2:4 in particular: "if it were possible that Amlici should gain the voice of the people, he, being a wicked man, would deprive them of their rights and privileges"), and used their informal networks and social connections to make it clear that, however much you agree with some of his claims, a man as crude and mean-spirited as Trump should not be elected...and as a result, Trump was robbed for 10, or perhaps as many as 24 Electoral College votes? Even if Trump is able to maximize Clinton's negatives and recapture parts of the Rust Belt and the Upper South, it would be just about impossible for him to make up for losing the Intermountain West. Between the Mormons and the newly enfranchised Hispanic population (which American Mormons are already more willing to work with than the rest of the Republican mainstream), America, if all else this election goes badly, would still be spared President Trump.

And what would we get in return? Presumably President Hillary Clinton, a person that the great majority of American Mormons won't like for reasons from the political right (in the same way I won't like that result from the political left). But politicians--and laws, and regulations, and even Supreme Court rulings--one doesn't like is part of life in a pluralistic mass democracy which at least aspires to operate like a constitutional republic. In the end, as citizens, we have to make the best decisions we can, standing on principle when we are able, and compromising for the greater good when push comes to shove.

Over the next five months, Trump is going to be shoving on all Republicans--which most American Mormons are--quite hard. Mormons like me here in Kansas almost certainly can't do anything more than symbolically resist the Trump wave. But in the American West...there, you can do more. You just may be able to turn that shoving back on this potentially dangerous blowhard. And by so doing, you all just may be able to be the people that 19th-century prophets were convinced would act to save the Constitution. I'm a political scientist; I know that every election it's always in the interest of those involved to make like the upcoming election is the most important election ever. Well, amazingly enough, this year, that just might be true. And that means maybe, just maybe, if the Mormon voters of the western U.S. do what's right, some element of the ridiculous White Horse Prophesy might turn out to be true as well.

2 comments:

GotMullet
said...

Oh yes.... by all means pull the lever for "Put-a-little-ice-on-that" Clinton's wife, and their cover up syndicate. Clinton trumps Trump WAY MORE when it comes to despicableness. No. There's got to be an alternative.

Quotes

"Every one of the standards according to which action is condemned demands action. Although the dignity of persons is inevitably violated in action, this dignity would be far less recognized in the world than it is had it not been supported by actions such as the establishment of constitutions and the fighting of wars in defense of human rights. Action must be untruthful, yet religion, science, philosophy, and the arts, the main forms of absolute fidelity to the truth, could not survive were they unsupported by action. Action cannot but be anticommunal in some measure, yet communal relationships would be almost nonexistent without areas of peace and order, which are created by action. We must act hesitantly and regretfully, then, but still we must act."

(Glenn Tinder, The Political Meaning of Christianity: The Prophetic Stance [HarperSanFrancisco, 1991], 215)

"[T]he press was still the last resource of the educated poor who could not be artists and would not be tutors. Any man who was fit for nothing else could write an editorial or a criticism....The press was an inferior pulpit; an anonymous schoolmaster; a cheap boarding-school; but it was still the nearest approach to a career for the literary survivor of a wrecked education."

"Mailer was a Left Conservative. So he had his own point of view. To himself he would suggest that he tried to think in the style of [Karl] Marx in order to attain certain values suggested by Edmund Burke."

(Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night [The New American Library, 1968], 185)

"All those rely on their hands, and each is skillful at his own craft. / Without them a city would have no inhabitants; no settlers or travellers would come to it. / Yet they are not in demand at public discussions, nor do they attain to high office in the assembly. They do not sit on the judge's bench or understand the decisions of the courts. They cannot expound moral or legal principles and are not ready with maxims. / But they maintain the fabric of this world, and the practice of their craft is their prayer."

(Ecclesiasticus (Sirach) 38:31-34, in The Revised English Bible with the Apocrypha [Oxford University Press, 1989])

"The tendency, which is too common in these days, for young men to get a smattering of education and then think themselves unsuited for mechanical or other laborious pursuits is one that should not be allowed to grow up among us...Every one should make it a matter of pride to be a producer, and not a consumer alone."

(Wilford Woodruff, Millennial Star [November 14, 1887], 773)

"We are parts of the world; no one of us is an isolated world-whole. We are human beings, conceived in the body of a mother, and as we stepped into the larger world, we found ourselves immediately knotted to a universe with the thousand bands of our senses, our needs and our drives, from which no speculative reason can separate itself."

"'Business!' cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. 'Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!'"

(Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol [Candlewick Press, 2006], 35)

"The Master said, 'At fifteen, I set my mind upon learning; at thirty, I took my place in society; at forty, I became free of doubts; at fifty, I understood Heaven's Mandate; at sixty, my ear was attuned; and at seventy, I could follow my heart's desires without overstepping the bounds of propriety.'"

"Lack of experience diminishes our power of taking a comprehensive view of the admitted facts. Hence those who dwell in intimate association with nature and its phenomena grow more and more able to formulate, as the foundations of their theories, principles which admit a wide and coherent development: while those whom devotion to abstract discussions has rendered unobservant of the facts are too ready to dogmatize on the basis of a few observations."

"[God] does not want men to give the Future their hearts, to place their treasure in it. . . . His ideal is a man who, having worked all day for the good of posterity (if that is his vocation), washes his mind of the whole subject, commits the issue to Heaven, and returns at once to the patience or gratitude demanded by the moment that is passing over him."

"Money is simply a tool. We use money as a proxy for our time and labor--our life energy--to acquire things that we cannot (or care not to) procure or produce with our own hands. Beyond that, it has limited actual utility: you can't eat it; if you bury it in the ground, it will not produce a crop to sustain a family; it would make a lousy roof and a poor blanket. To base our understanding of economy simply on money overlooks all other methods of exchange that can empower communities. Equating an economy only with money assumes there are no other means by which we can provide food for our bellies, a roof over our heads and clothing on our backs."

"A scholar's business is to add to what is known. That is all. But it is capable of giving the very greatest satisfaction, because knowledge is good. It does not have to look good or even sound good or even do good. It is good just by being knowledge. And the only thing that makes it knowledge is that it is true. You can't have too much of it and there is no little too little to be worth having. There is truth and falsehood in a comma."

"I believe in democracy. I accept it. I will faithfully serve and defend it. I believe in it because it appears to me the inevitable consequence of what has gone before it. Democracy asserts the fact the masses are now raised to a higher intelligence than formerly. All our civilization aims at this mark. We want to do what we can to help it. I myself want to see the result. I grant that it is an experiment, but it is the only direction society can take that is worth its taking; the only conception of its duty large enough to satisfy its instincts; the only result that is worth an effort or a risk. Every other possible step is backward, and I do not care to repeat the past. I am glad to see society grapple with issues in which no one can afford to be neutral."